Anna Politkovskaya

Frances Roberts for The New York Times

Updated: June 26, 2009

Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who was a strident critic of the Kremlin, was murdered in 2006. Her killing underlined the shrinking freedom allowed dissenters in Russian society, provoked international outrage and cast a shadow over Vladimir V. Putin's Russia.

Ms. Politkovskaya, who was 48, distinguished herself covering Moscow's war in Chechnya, which she characterized as "state versus group terrorism." She documented torture, mass executions, kidnapping and the sale by Russian soldiers of Chechen corpses to their families for proper Islamic burial, concluding, "What response could one expect but more terrorism, and the recruitment of more resistance fighters?"

On Oct. 7, 2006, she was found dead in her apartment building with a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol dropped at her side. Amid international clamor for answers regarding her death, Mr. Putin, the Russian prime minister who was then president, kept silent for three days. When he made his first remarks about the crime, he noted caustically that "the level of her influence on political life in Russia was utterly insignificant."

Investigators and colleagues concluded that someone had ordered her death to silence her, and some suspected the hand of state officials in the crime. Ms. Politkovskaya's editor at Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri A. Muratov, has maintained from the beginning that she was killed because her investigations were threatening the financial interests of figures within Russia.

But authorities say the murder was ordered from abroad by enemies of the present government - an apparent reference to the exiled billionaire Boris A. Berezovksy. Prosecutor Yuri Chaika, speaking at a press conference in August 2007, said the killers hoped to "create a crisis situation and bring about a return to the old management system in which money and oligarchs decided everything."

Of the 10 men originally arrested in the killing, three were charged with murder: Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police investigator. Prosecutors believe a third brother, Rustam, shot Ms. Politkovskaya, but he has never been arrested and is believed to be in hiding.

A fourth defendant, Col. Pavel A. Ryaguzov, was accused of criminal ties to the killers, but no role in the killing itself. Colonel Ryaguzov is an official from the F.S.B., the domestic successor to the K.G.B.

On Feb. 19, 2009, a Moscow jury ruled unanimously to acquit the three men charged with murder. The acquittals frustrated state prosecutors' hopes of putting the case to rest.

The three men were peripheral figures: two shaggy-haired young Chechen brothers accused of acting as a lookout and a driver for the suspected triggerman, and a former police investigator accused of organizing logistics for the killing.

The trial left Ms. Politkovskaya's supporters discouraged at what they saw as the government's failure to pursue the case to its core. But the day after the acquittal, the presiding judge ordered the case reopened.

The judge, Yevgeni Zubov, ordered the Russian Investigative Committee to reopen the case and told the Interfax news agency that he would give investigators material evidence.

On June 25, 2009, Russia's Supreme Court overturned the acquittals of the four men accused of involvement in Ms. Politkovskaya's murder and ordered a new trial. In ordering the retrial, the court sided with the prosecution, which argued that there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the first trial, a court spokesman said.